Trinity College Dublin

Road transportation is the life blood of industrialized economies. Unfortunately, the existing road network, including the motorway system, is becoming increasingly congested as both the number of vehicles to be accommodated increases and the scope to build new and larger highways diminishes. According to the European Commission, in the European Union (EU), congestion costs amount to 50 billion € per year or 0.5 % of the EU’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and by 2010 this figure could rise to 1% of EU GDP. The number of cars per thousand persons has increased from 232 in 1975 to 460 in 2002. The overall distance travelled by road vehicles has tripled in the last 30 years and, in the last decade, the volume of road freight grew by 35% contributing to 7,500 km or 10% of the network being affected by traffic jams daily. Among a variety of other initiatives, it is clear that in the future it will be necessary to more efficiently manage road capacity.

Our research on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and automotive systems is investigating the application of service-oriented architectures, ubiquitous computing technologies, and wireless communications to road-traffic management in order to reduce the effects of increasing road usage including delay, unpredictable journey times, excessive pollution, and driver frustration as well as to improve road safety. Our hypothesis is that increased use of emerging sensor technologies as well as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications will enable safer driving by allowing future smart vehicles to coordinate their activities as well as making their drivers more aware of and better able to avoid potential hazards. Future intelligent traffic-control systems will be able to exploit the variety of sensor data available to optimize the use of the available road infrastructure resulting in a reduction in road congestion, and improved transportation reliability.

In essence our goal is of a road-traffic system in which cars rarely need to stop en route from source to destination and accidents are rare. Smart traffic lights would ensure that cars never have to stop in the absence of opposing traffic and would coordinate to minimize journey times, maximize the throughput of people (rather than vehicles) and minimize driver stress, for example, using information from onboard physiological sensors. Cars would coordinate their behavior and cooperate with roadside infrastructure to share road space efficiently, for example, coordinating crossing of intersections even in the absence traffic lights. Our research is addressing both the middleware (software) architectures needed to support such applications as well as the planning and coordination algorithms and data communications protocols that they will use.

Research Areas

• Collaborative Driver Assistance Systems
• Collaborative Motorway Traffic Management
• Dynamic One-way Car Sharing
• Smart Urban Traffic Control
• Real-time Vehicular Communication
• Middleware for Transportation Clouds

Relevant projects

NEMBES, Real-time Vehicular Communication, Transportation Cloud

People

Jan Čurn, Mong Leng Sin, Dan Marinescu, Marco Slot, Shu Zhang, Paul Dolan, Melanie Bouroche, Razvan Popescu, Rene Meier, Vinny Cahill